Rex Kerr
2 min readMay 6, 2022

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I'm sort of confused about what your position here actually is. Just to clarify, there are two ways I see that her comments could be viewed as entirely unacceptable, and yet leave us with a different idea of her mental state.

1. Duarte believes one or both of that black men are rapists and/or that black men raping white women is worse somehow than any other kind of rape, and her repugnant views were incautiously aired here and should be vehemently condemned.

2. Duarte does not believe any of this, but in trying to use right-wing white supremacist stereotypes to highlight their own hypocrisy, she emitted a statement so awful that her insensitivity in allowing herself to write it even as a hypothetical (esp. without calling it as such) is racist and should be condemned.

At different points you seem to be taking different stances. The "well, easy" paragraph suggests (1). The "To be completely fair" paragraph, however, admits (2) as a possibility and the following paragraph explains why (2) isn't acceptable. But the "hood wearing" paragraph is hard to understand unless you mean (1).

I agree that it's highly problematic to abuse one right in order to try to protect another, especially when the rights synergize rather than conflict.

But you're also making a point about tolerance, except I can't quite figure out what it is. If your position is (1), then everything you say about Duarte seems quite reasonable in that context; but if your position is (2), I think some pushback is warranted, because at the end of the day you do need a large coalition of rights-minded folks cooperating to make substantial progress towards justice, and it's unclear to me that such a pool will remain if the strength of reaction you apparently endorse becomes the norm.

If your position is "can't really tell for sure whether it's (1) or (2) so I'm going to split the difference in the reaction, too", that makes some sense...but it's not really obvious to me from what you wrote if this is what you're saying. ("Even if I gave her the maximum possible benefit of the doubt, this is a really messed-up thing to say; and I'm not ready to give her that much benefit of the doubt.")

Sorry to spend so many words on what seems like a somewhat pedantic topic, but I think this is actually key to how and whether we're going to be able to make progress or get diverted by disparaging and trampling upon each other.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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